Thanks to Gloria M. Rodas for a timely warning about how genealogy should be done. I sometimes feel, as a former teacher, that the educational system has been much at fault here. So many immature students were told that they had to do a 'research project', which in fact required little real research and no original thinking. It was often a good excuse for a lazy teacher not to actually teach or test real knowledge. All it required was cutting and pasting the work of others, often without even a consistent theme or focus. What they learnt from this is that pinching the work of others is normal, but referencing it is not a vital matter. In fact, assimilating new information carefully is important before it can be re-formed intelligently to create something valuable and worthwhile. In this area Less can be More This was BEFORE the computer revolution, so it must be worse now! Some witl answer me by claiming that this is all too much to ask of 14-18 year olds. Rubbish. If they aren't taught then, they will probably NEVER learn to think critically later. We get the standards we teach for and demand. Genealogists are all doing research in the home today, so we need to know this. We also live in an instant 'feel good' age where the facts come second to my good vibes about any issue. The result is that a great deal of phoney genealogy is out there, fraudulently being believed and reproduced. Just because it is in a hard cover book is not a reason to believe it either. As an example, I was able to disprove a seemingly strong claim to be related to a famous Irishman whose portrait decorated the early pages of the family book. An understandable error in this case.. Only a lot of real research made the correction possible. No-one is perfect, so it is important to add qualifications to ALL your doubful entries. I use SPEC for any speculative person or link, EST for a date or place that is only my approximate guess. These are specific warning flags that signal the reader to beware and not re-publish this as fact. In Australia we have the saying that we all need 'A good Bull Dust detector.' In genealogy, especially. Barrie Wright Adelaide